Meditation

Fiction must always be fiction rooted in life experience. That experience need not be personal to you the writer.

Retirement gave me the time to reassess my life. No longer constrained by the intense demands of my profession, now freed from daily commutes, time was on my hands and on my mind. A change of environment far from my past existence in a new country also helped. Under the Spanish sun, seated watching the sun bathers on the beach for the first time in almost four decades, I experienced freedom. The last time I'd felt like this was riding on my Vespa SS 180 (MAC 885G like the one above). I had set off to the Polytechnic to begin my professional course.

It was a typical Yorkshire day in 1968: grey, cloudy, coo, still and September sticky. Hurtling along on the dual carriageway of the ring road I was keen not to be late for the first day course induction. As I recalled this experience I had my Proust moment. That had been the point in time when Iwas going to leave my freedom and behind. Once my destination was reached any ambitions to be a writer were going to bleed away with dire slowness over the decades. The tourniquet of retirement arrested that bleeding away of creative ambition. Slowly the creative impulse found itself reborn.

It was only with hindsight that I came to understand how much my life had been shaped between the ages of sixteen and nineteen. In effect I was a product of the Sixties and that decade would forever define me in many tangible and intangible ways. So many personal experiences, some experienced with friends, some shared with girlfriends while a few others experienced with people I'd rather forget, yet this was where my creativity lay; back in my own past. So I determined to build my fictional world rooted in the reality of my experiences as a teenager of the Sixties. I would use what I had seen, thought, felt and experienced first and second hand as the foundation and building bricks for my stories.